A wrongly convicted man who spent 17 years in prison until lawyers discovered his lookalike has received more than a million dollars in compensation.
Richard Jones was imprisoned in 2000 for an aggravated robbery the previous year, in which he was alleged to have attempted to steal a female shopper’s handbag in a supermarket car park. He denied the charges, testifying on the stand that he was with his girlfriend at her home at the time of the robbery.
Despite his denial and the lack of physical or DNA evidence linking him to the crime, he was found guilty on the accounts of two eyewitnesses who separately identified him as the would-be robber in a photo line-up and sentenced to 19 years.
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“After he had been in prison for many years, other inmates pointed out to him that he bore a strong resemblance to another man,” the Kansas City Star reports, leading Jones to suspect that he had been convicted due to mistaken identity.
His case was taken up by lawyers working for the Paul E. Wilson Defender Project at the University of Kansas School of Law and the Midwest Innocence Project, nonprofits which seek justice for the wrongly-convicted. The lawyers were able to track down Jones’ doppelganger, Ricky Amos, a Kansas City man who indeed bore a striking visible resemblance to the man serving a lengthy jail term for a robbery he did not commit.
Last year, Jones’ legal team secured a court hearing at which they demonstrated that “witnesses, including the robbery victim, who looked at the pictures of the two men together could no longer say if Jones was the robber”, the Kansas City Star reports.
Johnson County District Judge Kevin Moriarty nonetheless ordered Jones' release on the grounds that “no reasonable juror would have convicted Jones” on eyewitness testimony alone knowing about his lookalike. Amos denies committing the crime, on which the statute of limitations has now expired.
This week, Jones, now 42, has been awarded a payout of $1,103,945 (£1,873,927) under a new statute in Kansas state law which allows prisoners to seek compensation for wrongful imprisonment. In addition, “he was granted a certificate of innocence and will receive counseling and health care through the state for two years”, NBC News reports.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe called the case “one of the most bizarre scenarios that I’ve seen in my 27 years of prosecuting cases”.
